Mt Wilson Loop again, hot and smoggy

This morning I hit the Sam Merrill Trailhead at Lake Ave at 6am to start the 28 mile Mt Wilson loop course.  I was carrying a new replacement water filter cartridge for my First Need filter, which last week I had discovered was cracked.  I had made that discovery  at Idlehour, 18 miles in with 10 miles to go.  (Some lessons are so good one just needs the occasional booster shot so to speak).

Today it was good thing I bought, and brought,  the new filter!  I got to the Mt Wilson summit and the spigots were red taped off and labelled "DANGER" .  Being dry I used an empty bottle to collect water from one spigot that was flowing although marked DANGER.  I used my First Need filter to pump this water and collected 2 bottles of clean water--  the First Need nominally filters down to 0.1microns, good enough for viruses.  (I thought it unlikely that the well was contaminated with Uranium...still, not knowing the contaminant I took the minimum).   I was able to fully reload later on the stream water at Idlehour.

The first part of the run was nice, the air was cool and clean. The smoke that had rolled up from San Diego yesterday had blown out overnight as the winds had shifted.  By midmorning  however, when I was climbing out of Idlehour, the wind had brought the wildfire smoke bad and it was a hot smoggy, chest-aching climb out of that canyon.

I was a bit vexed about the water situation at Wilson  as I had checked the ANF website on Thursday for water availability just two days before.  Ordinarily I would have simply assumed the water to be on at Wilson (as it has been, consistently, since as long as I can recall) and not bothered to check.  But I'd been getting a bit tired of this route and was considering a run to Red Box instead of Mt Wilson summit-  provided there was water available at Red Box.  However, the ANF website listed no water there.  I checked Skyline Park as a "control" and the ANF site listed  potable  water as available (which I believed--after all, it was on last week!).   So I decided to run to Wilson/Skyline Park and run the usual loop course down the Toll-Road and cut back to the Mt Lowe railbed via Idlehour.

What bugs me about all this is that as I was running down the Toll Road, there was a veritable queue of hikers heading up.  I feel bad for these folks, since its a good 7 to 10 miles up to Mt Wilson Skyline Park depending on the trailhead-  a bad day for these folks to find no water at the summit; and I doubt many of them were carrying filters.  Since ANF doesn't answer the phones on the weekend the only information available is via the website, which was carelessly not updated to reflect the water situation.

I just went to post the information about the Mt Wilson spigots being off to the AC100 Facebook page-  someone had already done it.